A New Take on Text Search

Like the annoying student who spouts off a litany of facts when the teacher asks for a one-word answer, many search engines dredge up far more than users want. Now, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center say the days of keyword-based search results might be overat least for academics.

Their eTBLAST search tool scans documents for text similarity, rather than matching keywords, allowing users to input a full paragraphsay, an abstract or invention descriptionas a query. Based on word order, frequency, and proximity, eTBLAST turns out a list of documents and scores them by similarity. UT's Harold "Skip" Garner, who helped develop the code, says that the team is poised to release an updated version of eTBLAST, which would return results in a matter of seconds, down from several minutes.

Garner adds that eTBLAST can also catch cheaters. By searching an excerpt from a scholarly paper or journal, the engine can look for an exact match. At least four plagiarism investigations have started as a result of suspiciously similar pages found through eTBLAST. The technology's limited scope, however, means that most universities will still use more road-tested tools, such as Turnitin or SafeAssignment, which compares a manuscript with data from a broader Internet archive.

For now, the engine searches only biomedical, physics, and U.S. patent databases, but Garner predicts further expansion into law, business, and other areas. And he's always looking for more databases. "Any free computer-science database the public knows of, just let us know, and we'd be happy to incorporate it," he says.

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